| If you've been reading Calitics for any length of time, you'd have learned long ago that the California Republican Party is unelectable in statewide races. When we started calling them the Zombie Death Cult in 2009, it was because we realized the party was a dead party walking, made up of a small group of ideologues who are determined to lead this state off a cliff. Earlier this year I started a new moniker for the CRP, noting that they had become a white man's party. It is a party whose base hates Latinos, does not believe women deserve basic rights to control their own bodies, and wants to treat LGBT Californians like second-class citizens. That is not a party that is electable in this state, and the Democrats' dominance of statewide elections since 1996 merely reinforces the point.
In short, you get the news first at Calitics, and then it shows up in places like the Los Angeles Times:
The road to redemption for the Republican Party in California may be even rougher than November's statewide electoral drubbing indicated, as a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll shows a deep reluctance among many voters to side with a GOP candidate and broad swaths of the state holding views on government's role that conflict with Republican tenets....
Strikingly, almost one in five California voters said they would never cast a ballot for a Republican. Among Latinos, that rose to almost one in three. Only 5% of California voters were as emphatically anti-Democrat.
These numbers are simply damning. In a year where Republicans did pretty well across the country, they ran into a Blue Wall at the Sierra Nevada. They have lost every single statewide office, and failed to pick up a single Congressional or legislative seat.
They even lost another Assembly seat, and this too tells the story of why the Zombie Death Cult is doomed. In AD-5, a suburban Sacramento district, Dr. Richard Pan dispatched Andy Pugno, the author of Proposition 8, showing that social conservatism costs Republicans elections. What clearer evidence do you need of the fact that the CRP is in deep trouble?
Well, the LA Times has marshaled quite a lot of additional evidence. The LAT/USC poll that drove the LAT's article is full of devastating results for Republicans:
When asked whether government regulation of businesses protected the public or caused more harm than good, Californians defended regulation by a 15-point margin. When asked whether government protection of minorities was important or fostered societal divisions, government protection won, 52% to 35%. When asked whether government should help the poor, or whether that encouraged dependence, Californians backed government help, 49% to 39%.
And as bad as things are now for the Zombie Death Cult, they're about to get far worse:
As troubling as those numbers were from a conservative perspective, the poll suggested that Republicans face worse problems ahead. Among voters under age 30, same-sex marriage was backed by 64%, 15 points higher than among votes overall. Younger voters' support for immigration reform was 10 points higher than overall. They and Latinos defended government activism more strongly than voters overall.
Ideologically, 42% of those under age 30 described themselves as liberal, whereas only 20% of those age 65 and above did. Only 28% of Latino voters and 36% of nonpartisan voters were over age 50, compared with 52% of white voters and 51% of Republicans.
In short, California Republicans are fucked. Their base demands fealty to an agenda of white supremacy and anti-government ideology that the majority of Californians simply do not want. Meg Whitman spent $140 million to learn that it is not possible to appease the right-wing base AND win a statewide election, because the right-wing base hates the Latino voters who now decide the outcome of elections in California. And younger Californians, who are seeing their future evaporate thanks to right-wing policies, are simply becoming more deeply entrenched in their progressive values.
Some Republicans are hoping that the combination of the redistricting commission and the top-two primary will reverse the trend. Not only will they be disappointed, but it seems likely that both will rebound against the CRP. Redistricting is going to reduce the number of safe seats that enable people like Darrell Issa, John Campbell, Devin Nunes, and Dana Rohrabacher to spout an extremist agenda. California Republicans in the House think they're on the verge of power, but they're more likely to find out that being in the majority will simply further alienate them from the electorate. When people like Devin Nunes find their safe seats gone, they're going to have a rough time getting re-elected in 2012.
The top-two primary, pushed by Abel Maldonado and Arnold Schwarzenegger in an attempt to push both parties toward a more corporate agenda, will not produce the more moderate GOP that those two hope for. In districts that will remain safely red, the basic party dynamics will still produce right-wing Republicans. The party's money, voter mobilization, and ideological systems all conspire to favor right-wingers over moderates. In districts where the top-two candidates are Republicans and Democrats (i.e. not from the same party) the Republican will usually be a right-wing extremist. That's been the experience with Washington State's top-two primary, and I expect it to be repeated here.
California Democrats appear to have achieved a realignment of the party system to one with a long-term Democratic majority. It is the same opportunity President Obama had, but chose to give up in order to bail out the banks and make an extraordinarily foolish attempt to try and make deals with the Republicans. California Democrats understood that you win elections by running against right-wing extremism, instead of trying to appease it.
As long as California Democrats remain faithful to the progressive agenda of the diverse but strong coalition that has asked them to govern this state, they should have every reason to expect to sustain long-term power. If they stray from that agenda, however, they'll open the door for a Republican return by alienating the progressive base and discrediting Democratic policies.
As a wise man once said, with great power comes great responsibility. Let's hope California Democrats use their power wisely, and ensure that the California Republican Party never takes power here again. If the Zombie Death Cult doesn't like it, well, there's always Texas.
UPDATE: George Skelton makes a similar point today, though he seems a bit naive about the Zombie Death Cult's willingness to change:
Everyone who isn't in denial knows what the California GOP must do to survive:
Drop the demagoguery about illegal immigrants because it scares off the fast-growing Latino electorate.
Mute the anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-environmental rhetoric.
Focus on economic development and fiscal conservatism. There's a natural constituency for that. Look at how Californians voted on the ballot propositions.
The party's base will not allow the party to drop the demagoguery, the rhetoric, and the opposition to economic development. It's not a matter of the party elites shifting the message. The CRP represents a base that is so fundamentally hostile to 21st century reality that the party cannot make those changes without changing the base. And the base will consistently veto those shifts.
On the final point Skelton makes, there's not much hope for the CRP there either. Their party is hostile to any government action to promote economic development. On "fiscal conservatism," California is at an impasse, but the LAT/USC poll numbers make it pretty damn clear that Californians want robust government services. They just need someone to show them how to fund it, and need a Democratic Party that's willing to consistently make the case for such funding.
The problem with the CRP isn't the leadership, but the base. Until that base is marginalized, Republicans will be a dead party in California. |
